(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

“Victorians deliver damning verdict on local councils!” the Herald Sun screamed from its front page yesterday morning. According to the story, more than half of Victorians have had a gutful of local councils and want them “abolished”, replaced with larger regional authorities, or to have the state government take over their duties. And thereby hangs a tale or two. 

A few months ago, a very senior Victorian government minister was visiting Darebin Council, in Melbourne’s inner north. Darebin covers Northcote, Thornbury, Preston and Reservoir, and is bisected by Bell Street, the “Hummus Curtain”, that once separated Labor booths in the north from Green booths in the south (the divide has since moved northwards). 

A senior council staffer was telling this very senior government minister about the complexities of managing a council covering such diverse areas — to which the VSGM replied that if he had his way, he’d abolish councils altogether, weren’t worth a pinch of dry piss, etc. The remark was taken at the time as arrogance and bluster by the Andrews government about the immovable frustrations of local government.

Now? Well, the poll, by RedBridge of 1189 Victorians finds that 45% want to abolish local councils, and support for having fewer local councils is substantial: 57% compared with 24% against. 

There are no details of the polling method or selection process either there or on RedBridge’s website, but there’s no reason to doubt it was competently done. What’s notable is that it was done and is now in play, because RedBridge is of course the consultancy outfit of former Labor/Dan Andrews consigliere Kos Samaras. So by an incredible coincidence, he and his former employers are working on the same unprompted issue at the same time. 

So why a push against local councils now? All governments find them annoying, and they are sometimes corrupt or dysfunctional or both, but they handle the thousands of issues that are purely local, at a local level. They also provide a level of actual democracy, in which people can serve their community and get elected without the support of party machines. 

There’s the rub, of course, because such democracy is increasingly locking Labor out, especially in inner-city areas. In Yarra (covering Richmond, Fitzroy and Collingwood) there are no Labor councillors, two Socialists and a five-person Greens majority. Darebin had four Greens and a left independent until recently. Merri-bek (formerly Moreland, Brunswick and Coburg) has Greens and Socialists. And Maribyrnong (Footscray) has one Socialist and is likely to go further left next election.  

This process will only spread. Teals will begin to contest councils in eastern suburbs and displace old chamber-of-commerce types, and left independents will pop up in middle- and outer-suburban councils in the north and west.

Labor’s ability to do anything about this is limited by the neutering of branches in the federal intervention, and by the state party largely being a ghost organisation run from Dan Central. Labor has tried to contest this by playing up minor flurries — appointing a “monitor” to Yarra, because the council, gasp, had extended debates about policy (heh, also a Greens councillor sitting while on charges — later dismissed — for assault).   

So why hasn’t Labor tried to do something about this before? Well, it did, and in fact this latest push is not so much dealing with the problem as with the mess left by the last attempt to solve it. In 2018, Adem Somyurek, back from brief sinbin exile, swept into the ministry of local government and took up the plan to change the way local councils are elected. Like most councils, Victorian councils have a proportional system, usually based around three wards of about three members each, thus allowing for a mix of localism and fair representation. The Somyurek-driven plan was to turn this into nine single-member wards, a manifestly anti-democratic move, against the global current towards proportional representation. 

That was imposed on multiple councils (including Darebin) before the last council elections, and it did help the wheezing, broken-down Labor machine to get a couple of councillors. But Labor left Yarra, Merri-bek and others alone, knowing it’d have an inner-city revolt on its hands if it didn’t do it from strength. 

Sadly for it, that strength ebbed when Somyurek was filmed by spook cameras, caught allegedly running a branch-stacking operation from the borrowed office of the senator with the longest tenure on the Parliamentary Joint Intelligence Committee. The drive to “reform” — to be sacking councils, Somyurek is recorded as saying to some tame nong in the tapes — flagged somewhat as Somyurek was re-defenestrated. 

Labor also realised something else: councils with nine ultra-local wards were no guarantee of Labor success in a new era of independents. In fact, it could prove to be a nightmare, a series of incubators for enthusiastic local movements and ideal for local community leaders who knew everything and everyone in a 36-block area. Labor was coming to understand that the quality of its local potential candidates was declining, with the term “weirdo misfits” thrown around.

So now, quite possibly, it is desperate to back out of completing the “reform” process, but equally desperate not to revert to the old system — and give Greens and the left a win. Further amalgamation is a great way out of that, creating mega-councils in the name of 21st-century efficiency. It would also, I presume, try to further restrict the authority of councillors and give more power to the bureaucracy. 

No one is going to abolish local authorities per se, unless power has made them stark-raving megalomaniacal — and Dan is a good two years away from that. But you could just have fully administered, non-elected local authorities if you were really bloody-minded.

You would, however, create, as your enemy, the greatest popular front imaginable, a coalition joining inner-urban anarchists to property owner activists, all concerned that every road-use alteration and planning application for a shed would either be handled by a bureaucrat or by someone in, gasp, Treasury. 

Amalgamation? Well, the approach would be to do a repeat Jeff Kennett: combine inner-urban areas with their adjacent middle-outer urban areas to dilute the left and Greens power. Thus Yarra would join to Boorondara (Hawthorn-Camberwell), Darebin to Banyule (Bullen-Templestowe) and Merri-bek with the People’s Juche Democratic Republic of North Korea.

I must say this is worth it to see Yarra Greens’ Anab Mohamud fight it out with the tweeded burghers of Canterbury, and Maribyrnong Socialist Jorge Jorquera wade with sword and flame into the perpetual cesspool of Labor-dominated Brimbank. But the loss would be of genuine local representation. With such vast areas to cover and consider, the bureaucracy would run the joint, which is surely the point.

It would also provide its own point of resistance, as councils combined for the right to stay apart. I have seen Yarra socialist Stephen Jolly lock arms with blue-rinse National Trust ladies in protests and it’s a beauti– well, it’s a sight. Not only that, but council amalgamations may actually revive the Liberal Party. Buried in the polling, but not featured in the story, is the fact that 40% of respondents believe their council has the right priorities, compared with 26% who don’t. There is thus a residual consent to many councils as they are.

But it would be tempting for Labor to de facto destroy local representation, particularly as regards planning, since council bureaucrats are almost uniformly pro-development as so many of them move on to high-paid jobs as planning “consultants” for developers.

And this is all about to go to the next level on steroids with the further promulgation of the Suburban Rail Loop. The SRL will never be completed, and doesn’t need to be. It’s a device to create special development zones that remove residents’ rights to file planning objections, to smooth compulsory purchase, and to hand the land to integrated developers — on the model by which Lendlease got a deal for blocks of Melbourne CBD property in exchange for building Melbourne’s darling baby white elephant, the Metro tunnel. The new planning rules for the SRL kicked in just before Christmas. It’ll be open slather from now on.

How good would it be for Labor to do this, and simultaneously knock out a few councils of sufficient locality to become a focus of resistance? Especially when you consider what we’ll get — charmless malls, Woolies, Coles, JB Hifi and Officeworks to the horizon. With this throat-clearing about local councils — no one gives a rat’s about the shires — Labor is getting the thing rolling. 

The final notable feature of this is where it got announced: on the front page of the mortal enemy. Yes, the leadership of the Hun has thrown in the towel. With Labor here for eight more years, barring catastrophe, and aiming for 12, News Corp’s fading Melbourne tabloid, now with the weight and heft of a freesheet, has run up the white flag and joined the caravan (the Danavan?).

It’ll mainly attack the Greens, of course, but it has given up on the Looooserberals, especially in the John Pesutto era. The fix is in — we’re a democratically elected one-party state! Make every municipality a Danicipality! Build a red bridge to the future, one Hun front page at a time!